versation, there were few topics raised
on which he was not found contributing something worth hearing, and
Boswell, no very partial witness, admits that his talk evinced "a mind
crowded with all manner of subjects." Like Sir Walter Scott, Smith has
been unjustly accused of habitually abstaining from conversing on the
subjects he had made his own. Boswell tells us that Smith once said to
Sir Joshua Reynolds that he made it a rule in company never to talk of
what he understood, and he alleges the reason to have been that Smith
had bookmaking ever in his mind, and the fear of the plagiarist ever
before his eyes. But the fact thus reported by Boswell cannot be
accepted exactly as he reports it, and his explanation cannot be
accepted at all. Men able to converse on a variety of subjects will
naturally prefer to converse on those unconnected with their own shop,
because they go into company for diversion from their own shop, but
it is a question of company and circumstances. If Smith ever made any
such rule as Boswell speaks of, he certainly seems to have honoured it
as often by the breach as by the observance, for when his friends
brought round the conversation to his special lines of research, he
never seems to have failed to give his ideas quite freely, nay, as may
be seen from the remark just quoted from Henry Mackenzie, not freely
merely but abundantly--as many as would make a book. He does not
appear to have been in this respect a grudging giver. I have already
quoted his remark on hearing of Blair's borrowing some of his
juridical ideas, "There's enough left." When Sir John Sinclair was
writing his _History of the Revenue_ Smith offered him the use of
everything, either printed or manuscript, in his possession bearing
upon the subject. And if it is true that he was discussing his own
book chapter by chapter with Franklin, Price, and others, about the
very period when this remark to Sir Joshua purports to have been made,
it appears most unlikely that he could have thought of setting any
churlish watch on his lips in ordinary conversation. But however it be
with his disposition to talk about his own pursuits, we know from
Dugald Stewart that he was very fond of talking of subjects remote
from them, and as Stewart says, he was never more entertaining than
when he gave a loose rein to his speculation on subjects off his own
line. "Nor do I think," says Stewart, "I shall be accused of going too
far when I say that he was sc